One advantage of vintage gear is that everything associated with it is likely to be cheap, often very cheap meaning that you try things out that you wouldn’t normally consider. So, to my purchase of a Nikon F4, I have added a medium quality zoom lens Nikkor 28-105mm f3.5-4.5 AF-D (the review in the link pretty much confirms my own thoughts about the lens and its performance though I feel a little less generous – it only gets acceptably sharp after f5.6 and I would not describe its zooming action as at all smooth, nevertheless its a convenient lens to keep on the camera) – and today, just out of the box with fresh batteries, a Nikon Speedlight SB-24. This was a flash unit that was designed to work extremely closely with, specifically, the Nikon F4. It measures for the correct exposure through the lens during the exposure and as you change settings on the camera such as the aperture or the focal length of the lens the flashgun makes its own internal changes through its clever connections in the hotshoe. (it doesn’t seem to do any of this when fixed to a more modern Nikon like my D810 unfortunately). I’m yet to see the results of a few headshots that I’ve just taken, of course, until I finish the film and get it developed. Youtube offers some useful tutorials on the effect of various directions of pointing the flash head, along with the effect of fixing a white card to the top of the unit – which I have tried as seen in the picture here.

Upto now I have never been interested in using flash and most photographs that I have seen that do use it, even fill-in flash that is supposed to be subtle, have been the exact opposite of the kind of pictures that I am interested in taking. However, I can see that it is possible to use flash carefully and this speedlight/camera combination makes it particularly possible. My first assumption that you point a flash unit directly at (the face of) your subject was clearly (terribly) wrong – that’s why these units can tilt upwards and swivel from side to side of course – so that was my ignorance. I’m going to keep experimenting.

I’m expecting a waist level finder in the next week or so.

Having bought Bellamy Hunt’s Film Camera Zen after spending some weeks checking out the old Nikon film cameras from the 1950s to their last F camera, I decided that one of these was for me. I enjoy the lightness and simplicity of my Pentax ME Super that I bought (duty free – supposedly) in 1983 or 4 at Singapore airport, but too often the images are poorly focused (by me) and never exactly sharp. I have hesitated about shelling out for a second film camera. I was interested in the last largely mechanical Nikon F camera, the F3, because of its reputation and nice style. Its currently selling for between £300 and £400 and I couldn’t justify spending that amount. But I noticed, in passing, an F4 at about half this price and have ended up spending around £200 for a beautifully preserved version that arrived this morning from Japan. The F4 was one of three transition professional cameras that Nikon made between mechanical film cameras and their first (professional level) digital SLR, the appropriately named D1. It was manufactured between 1988 and 1996. From the serial on the camera I have bought it looks like it was made in 1992. After the F4 came, predictably, the F5 which is huge and heavy and not just heavy like the F4, and the F6 which is virtually a digital camera that still uses film. Its clever but is on the market for around £1000.

Today, the day after receiving it, I put a roll of Tri-X through it. I wanted to test that basic things like the exposure meter and the focussing worked and also to see whether my more modern lenses would work with this 1980s camera. I shot the whole film in a little over an hour (a record for me – mostly it takes a few months to finish a film) and developed it just now in the kitchen. I was very pleased that my newer G lenses worked very well and focussed more quickly and quietly that the older AF-D lenses. I have quite a collection so its a real attraction for me.

Its old school but I made notes about every exposure so I can check that there are no problems with the camera.

Now that I have developed and scanned the first roll of film, I can say that it performs perfectly. The autofocus works and the exposure meter works very well. The only alert was that this camera predates vibration reduction so there is some obvious camera movement on shutter speeds less than 1/60. I will have to remember that.

Here’s some examples:

I’m hoping there is some way to bulk edit the camera info in Lightroom etc. In terms of workflow, I have made a preset that makes positive images from the scanned negs, then each image just needs a little tweaking of its curve. This will be fine for B&W but colour negatives are much more tricky and I might resort to Negative Lab Pro, a plugin that costs about £75 at the moment so not cheap. Trying it – the camera and Negative Lab Pro, with some Kodak Gold – about half the price of Portra – is my next plan.